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THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW
ALREADY we have mosaics of beauty in the American novel. But it lacks organic beauty. In the modern novels of England the high example of organic beauty seems to be the work of Hudson. No one knows what he does; but his touch unseals an essence. In the American novel we have nothing approaching this essence. One is grateful, in these days of the triumphant discovery of the common¬place, for mere beautiful mosaics. But these have little to do with the basic beauty, the organic beauty which a novel must breathe before it can approximate its potential scope and function. Now organic beauty in any art must be compact of beauty not already familiar to us. Familiar beauty can give us the mosaics. But it is strange¬ness in beauty which alone can weave the spell and bear the perfume. This is not to say unreality; but on the con¬trary a deeper reality than we are ac¬customed to divine. The reality of lit¬eral levels of perception to which we do not ordinarily penetrate or of which, rather, we are not often con¬scious as they penetrate our own plane. Professor Eucken's claim that the spiritual world is "an independent reality, waiting to be apprehended, waiting to be incorporated into our universe" is enormously served by art whose functioning is so largely in ex¬tensions of the ordinary faculties. Between the naturalistic novel, which is a record, and the romantic novel, which is the product of human imag¬ining, lies this other novel, the novel of tomorrow, concerned with immi¬nent yet almost undivined reality of human conduct, human dream, per¬ceived "for their own sakes, with the eyes of disinterested love." Our failure may lie in the fact that such beauty as our novels have is chiefly concerned with moral idealism and romantic love, as we know them now. Our moral idealism is still in¬tent on the esoteric with—shall we say ?—either simple standards which ought long ago to have been taken for granted or conventionalized stand¬ards having no correspondence with the mystery of conduct. Therefore our novels devote themselves to, say, one emerging from a crude upbring¬ing to the point of being hounded by her "furies" to escape tawdriness. Or even with those records of Henry James, that—Conrad calls him—that "historian of the individual con¬science, of adventure in which only choice souls are involved"—crucial in¬stances, always suffused with a cer¬tain beauty, but always the beauty of the individual conscience in known areas. Moral beauty rather than eso¬teric beauty. And as for the treatment in novels of romantic love, that is al ways a matter of bright feathers, of the pas de seal before the cave door, our only advance from that cave door courting being that there are antiph¬onal feathers and dancing instead of masculine antics alone. In spite of the fact that there is, both in idealism and in love, something not ourselves which is the glory of the experience, still the novel continues to treat only of measurable reactions, rarely call¬ing down the utter sunlit areas where every human soul does sometime en¬ter. Now these sunlit areas are a part of life, of reality. If they can be ex¬perienced, they can be incarnated in the novel. And it is these sunlit spaces of discernible reality which alone can give to the novel a basis of beauty. Moreover these reaches are not merely extensions of moral idealism or of romantic love. Neither the one nor the other may be of dominating concern there, save in some form so heightened that it has passed into pure beauty. Nor are these areas re¬mote; it is their power that they inter¬penetrate the homeliest lives and the most ordinary surroundings. This is a point which the worshipper of mo¬saics of beauty will not readily admit and perhaps he is right about his mo¬saics. But organic beauty is every¬where at home. The function of the novel is not to treat of life as it appears to the ordi¬nary eye; or even to treat life in its ordinary aspect if that were ascertain¬able. It is not even to treat of life as it should be, if that were ascertain¬able. Its function is not primarily to report the familiar at all. The func¬tion of the novel is to reflect the familiar as permeated by the unfamil¬iar; to reflect the unknown in its daily office of permeating the known. Thus the novelist is to go not only "joying in his visible universe" but in that universe by which his own is in¬terpenetrated. That universe invis¬ible save as music or color or the word or some other high manifestation causes it to flower in human experi¬ence. It is this high manifestation of the word which Hudson makes. He causes unfamiliar verities to enter our ken as verities. For the poetic mind, the mind then of the novelist at his best, is the perceiver of the real curve of life, the knower of something at least of its inner ecstasy. . . . How shall this interpretation best be made? This accomplishment concerns the form of the novel. However extreme has been the modern novel in stressing the com¬monplace, it has developed a form suitable for the expression of reality. Any reality, commonplace or not. This form is direct, unreflective, high¬ly selective. It is in immediate con¬tact with its material. It is uncom¬promising, tactless, unashamed. And its style is as bare and clear as a plain. It may be that the whole flair for the commonplace will be found to have contributed chiefly to the forma¬tion of a new purity of form. The treatment of the commonplace calls for stark precision and the novel has learned something of stark precision through treating the commonplace. If the novel had continued to treat of "the good, the true and the beautiful" it might be, with the redundance of that phrase itself, laboring on in a fringed and silken fashion, tasseled, plumed, melancholy. When the novel can take that form —that naked and lovely instrument— and that stark style, and cause them to function in the expression of name¬less beauty, such as Hudson summons, it will have sounded the new note, the note of the novel of tomorrow. And this will be a note of romanticism, but not of romanticism as we have ever known it. Ten years ago a wise man said: Free verse is all well enough. It is now a vehicle for many who otherwise would have no vehicle. But wait until the poets begin to use it. Then! So it is of the terse, the staccato, the compact, the shorn form and style of the modern American novel. Height¬en its compactness, take from it cer¬tain affectations such as deliberate sordidness, saturate it with all that divination can capture of communi¬cable beauty. "Then!" To use his divination to clarify the interpenetrating beauty of common life and to draw down still other beauty; not to manufacture it from unreality but to discern it in Reality and to reflect it; and then to pour this beauty through the clear crystal of a form as honest as a milk bottle—there lies the novelist's lovely, his impera¬tive task. But this he will never do if he is working with his mind alone. Only when he knows that his divination of beauty, of all life is "an independent growth which he himself tends and watches" will be incarnate in the novel the vapf qmi or'- -‘ortior of the dor=